How hard is Molecular Biology at UCSD? I know many of the other courses in the Biological Sciences department require similar courses, but I am wondering how much each of the courses in the Bio Department differ from each other. What might these differences be?
Do you mean the molecular biology major or the molecular biology course? Are you asking how hard it is from other biology classes or the other majors?
@baktrax The major. And from the other majors.
I don’t know how hard but from reddit, some students said they know of people who got 3.96 in bioengineering which as a lot of bio classes but they know nobody with above 3.0 from CS. My kid is in CS so I know I can use that to gage the difficulty of these majors. Doesn’t mean 100% accurate. But if you look at UCSD statistics, some document that I found online, 30% of people with biology major graduate with GPA higher than 3.5 vs 20-25% of students graduated from engineering with GPA above 3.5. So I think it’s not as hard, not a major to fear. I think these are 2013 statistics.
If you’re asking what the difference between Molecular Biology is compared to other biology majors, you can look at the differences yourself: http://biology.ucsd.edu/education/undergrad/maj-min/majors/index.html
They’re very similar, but there are a handful of courses that are different between the majors. One’s only harder than the others if you think those extra courses are really difficult. But to be honest, two students could take virtually the same courses and still be in two different majors because of how they are set up. One biology major isn’t harder than any other biology major.
@DrGoogle According to UCSD (http://studentresearch.ucsd.edu/_files/stats-data/enroll/apdisc.pdf), the average GPA of biology students in 2014 is 3.14 and the average GPA of engineering students in 2014 is 3.14. 25.3% of biology students have greater than a 3.5 GPA and 26.2% of engineering students have greater than a 3.5 GPA. What were your sources?
Bioengineering (http://be.ucsd.edu/undergraduate_major_bioengineering_curriculum) also doesn’t have “a lot of bio classes,” at least not when compared to a Molecular Biology major. The only classes a bioengineering and molecular biology major have in common is BILD 1 (an introductory bio course) and other basic prerequisites (like general chemistry and calculus). The rest of the bioengineering curriculum is made up of engineering courses, which are housed under the school of engineering. It’s a bit of a poor comparison, when the OP was asking about biology majors.
In response to your anecdotal reddit source, I can’t find average GPAs for students in any particular major (but I only did a cursory search), but Muir’s honor society (Caledonian Society) requires a GPA of 3.8 or better (http://muir.ucsd.edu/academics/honors_opp/honorsprograms.html). Of the 60 students admitted to the society in 2014, ~14 (by my count, so I may have counted wrong) were engineering or computer science majors. By comparison, there were ~15 biology majors. Obviously, this is only Muir students and isn’t a great metric, but it is better than the sample size of students that some reddit person knows. The point is that there are engineering students that seem to do very well.
Also, if we’re going just by anecdotal information, all the CS majors I knew had a >3.0 GPA at UCSD. Obviously, not a representative sample and it’s virtually meaningless, but there’s no reason you can’t counteract anecdotal evidence with more anecdotal evidence =D
EDIT: Just saw that you thought they were 2013 statistics. Based on the document above, in 2013, the average engineering GPA was 3.09, compared to biology’s average GPA of 3.14. 23.5% of engineering majors got a >3.5, compared to 26.7% of biology majors. There’s a slightly bigger difference there, but I wouldn’t consider it to be very significant.
I don’t have access to UCSD so I read a lot on reddit to get a feel of things. That person could be in a different college like Revelle, who knows, maybe harder than Muir? I was surprised to read it because my daughter knew a lot more kids with higher than 3.0 in CS.
Maybe the kids in computer science are not as gung-ho as the kids in bioengineering.
The GPA has different meanings for each major. Below 3.2 in engineering is OK. But below 3.3 in biology is a real danger.
Also for the same major, identical course but different professor, the class average GPA can also be different. Pick your professor carefully.
@DrGoogle Everything I quoted was open to the public. The stats I quoted are from here: http://studentresearch.ucsd.edu/ You don’t need an in at UCSD to get access to it–just google =D
None of the colleges are really harder than the others. The only real difference between Revelle and Muir requirements for a STEM major is the three extra humanities courses, and two of those can be taken at a community college, if the student would like to. I wouldn’t exactly consider that enough to doom CS majors to sub-3.0 GPAs. I only brought up Muir’s honor society because it was an easy one that gave some reference to GPAs in different majors, and it speaks against your point that one poster said they didn’t know anyone with above a 3.0 in CS. Clearly, there are students that do well in this major, and I can counter the other poster further with my own knowledge of students who get well above a 3.0 in CS. I just disagree with your point that because students on reddit said they know someone with a high GPA in bioengineering but they don’t know someone with a high GPA in CS that that means that bioengineering is easier than CS. All majors will have some students who do very well and some students who do poorly. Everyone will find some subjects easy and other subjects more difficult. There are students in CS who do very well because they are good at computer science, while they may do very poorly in another subject, like bioengineering. It doesn’t mean one is easier than the other. It just means that different students have different skill sets.
I’m not saying that GPA is the way to determine how difficult a major is or how difficult anyone’s experience is, by any means. I actually don’t think the average GPA of anything matters at all. As you’ll see in the average GPAs of the majors, they’re all pretty much the same in different disciplines (which makes perfect sense). I just don’t like when people throw out (likely meaningless) statistics with no reference, especially when they are quite potentially wrong.
Not quite sure what this is in reference to. But happy to discuss, if you want to clarify! I’m sure there are students who are dedicated and students who are not dedicated in any major.
Well, I know it’s one poster, but I was looking for the average GPA for CS. Because some CS classes people didn’t pass them so I was trying to dig around and found that reddit post. But CS is lumped with engineering and so it’s hard to find out the average. So if one specialty of engineering has higher GPA, then it definitely will skew the average for engineering.
As the bioengineering comment, my guess is that some of them are premeds so GPA is important while CS majors are not as gung-ho.
I think I noticed the same at my kid graduation class at another college, the valedictorian of the engineering class is also bioengineering and a few classes before that. So this is not just particular to UCSD.